ARTIST | RESEARCHER | FEMINIST

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Kelly Doley’s artistic practice lies at the nexus of individual and collaborative projects with a specific interest in critiquing power structures pertaining to gender, race and class. Her work takes the form of participatory performance, installation, video, painting, publication and curatorial projects. These various mediums are deployed interactively, in an attempt to foster direct communication, conversation, and other symbolic systems of exchange. Her practice is an ongoing attempt to interweave contemporary arts practice with the public sphere and facilitate a contemporary art that moves beyond those that have the language to decode it. Her works are also an attempt at creating new ways of learning and generating de-centralised pedagogical models to imagine new histories and futures.

Since 2007 she has been a founding member of the artist collaboration Brown Council (Kate Blackmore, Diana Smith, Frances Barrett, Kelly Doley). Their works draw on the historical lineages of both the visual and performing arts to engage with concepts of spectacle and endurance, as well as the dialogue between ‘liveness’ and the performance document or trace.

She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney (2011) as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts (1st Class Hons) from UNSW, Sydney (2006). She has exhibited and presented solo and collaboratively nationally and internationally including ISCP, New York, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Artspace and the MCA, Sydney, Westspace, Melbourne, Fremantle Arts Centre W.A., Boxcopy, Brisbane and NMOCA, Seoul. She has received numerous government and philanthropic arts grants and in 2012 she was the recipient of the Redlands Emerging Artist Award. In 2011 Brown Council received the QANTAS Encouragement of Contemporary Art Award and were the commissioned artists for the MCA’s 2014 Jackson Bella Room.

Since 2008 she has also been initiating participatory, curatorial and publishing projects. She has served on the board of Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney (2008-2009) and was co-founder of Sydney lounge-room gallery Cosmic Battle For Your Heart (2009-2011) with Mitch Cairns and Agatha Gothe Snape. In 2013 she launched JANIS, a pilot exhibition, publishing and talks project dedicated to promoting women in the arts. Her work with Brown Council and solo pieces are held in private and institutional collections nationally.